Posts Tagged ‘cold standby’

In this blog post, I’m going to discuss disaster recovery. After superstorm Sandy on the East Coast, there were people without power weeks after the storm. Data centers were affected by the storm as well. And although GoGrid’s East Coast data center didn’t experience an outage, some providers did. So it is timely to consider geographically redundant solutions rather than wait for the next superstorm.

Geographic Redundancy

There are three basic strategies you can implement today on GoGrid to make your application better able to recover from a data center outage: cold standby, warm standby, and full geographic-redundancy with multiple active data centers. Let’s start off with a definition:

Redundancy: (noun) the ability of an application or system to resist the failure of one or more constituent parts, or recover quickly from such failure.

Systems administration and IT management boils down to that proverbial 3:00am phone call. Your application is down. How do you respond? Having the proper plan and appropriate recovery assets in place is the key to surviving this all-too-real scenario. How current are your backups? Do you have standby servers already in place? If not, how quickly can you bring new ones online?